Jill Marie Holslin

Ma’ said it was right by the Chippewa River, 2023 work in progress

In this series, I am (re)storying my relationship to my Midwest family history. My ancestry is of white settlers, to the lands ceded by the Dakota in the 1851 Traverse de Sioux Treaty. The title of this series comes from my own mother's recollection of the farm place where her grandparents settled in 1914 and where she was born in 1937. She told me all she could remember was what her own mother told her. “Ma’ said it was right by the Chippewa River.” Writing myself into the history of the land in this way acknowledges colonialism and settlement as key processes that produce me as a subject. It is also a "refusal to disavow" the complicated and highly political work of memory in relation to land, place and claims to belonging. My work in this series makes visible the impacts of the colonial project of claiming land as ceded and no longer Indigenous, At the same time, I bring the rivers and Indigenous place names back into the center of the frame to remind us that our histories are intertwined.